Red Sheep

How Jessica Mitford found her voice.

The most important letter Jessica Mitford ever wrote was a forgery, addressed to herself (“Darling Decca”) at the age of nineteen, on February 3, 1937. Pretending to be a girlfriend travelling on the Continent, the future muckraker issued an effervescent pseudo-invitation to come across the Channel: “We have taken a house in Dieppe—that is, Auntie has taken it! We mean to make it the centre of a sort of motor tour to all the amusing places round. We are going there from Austria on Wednesday, and we should so love you to join us next weekend sometime.”

Mitford’s real destination was war-torn Spain, which she intended to reach after eloping with her second cousin Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill’s who had achieved a precocious stardom through both his flamboyant rebellion against British public-school culture and his later service with the International Brigade defending Madrid. The Dieppe ruse worked. Shown the letter of invitation, Mitford’s mother, Lady Redesdale, let her daughter slip out of England, and before long Decca and Romilly were in Loyalist Bilbao, transmitting news of the Spanish war for a press bureau that had taken them on.

Looked at in terms of class and period, all this might be regarded as normal youthful revolt. Lord Redesdale, known to his children as “Farve,” was a glowering martinet who used a stopwatch to time the sermons of whatever vicar he hired for the Cotswolds village that the Mitfords dominated. His wife (“Muv”) insisted that their six daughters, widely spaced in age but sharing a complicated matrix of games, nicknames, and nonsense languages, receive much of their education at home. Such confinement was especially resented by Decca, who from the start possessed terrific gumption: “Our night-nursery window looked out on the churchyard,” she recalled when she was in her seventies. “Once an uncle asked me if I wasn’t afraid of seeing all those tombstones at night? Not a bit (I am alleged to have replied), when there’s a full moon I enjoy watching Farve dig up the corpses to feed the chickens. What a DEAR little girl I must have been.”

She was the fifth of the sisters to make a London début. All of them had looks, wit, and aggression to burn; each was “a terrific hater,” Decca remembered. The escapades of the older ones had been harmless enough during the nineteen-twenties heyday of the Bright Young People (Evelyn Waugh even worked a hidden reference to twelve-year-old Decca’s pet lamb into “Vile Bodies”), but they proved a good deal less amusing when conducted under the darker clouds of the decade that followed. It was the grotesque doings of her sisters, more than the eccentricities and strictness of her parents, that prompted Decca’s flight in 1937.

“Whenever I see the words ‘Peer’s Daughter’ in a headline,” sighed Muv, “I know it’s going to be something about one of you children.” In 1936, after the collapse of her marriage to Bryan Guinness, heir to the brewing fortune, Diana, the greatest beauty among the girls, wed Sir Oswald Mosley, the head of the British Union of Fascists. This new connection fired up Nazi enthusiasm in Unity (middle name Valkyrie), who soon became friendly with Goebbels, Göring, and Hitler. The Führer displaced some Jews from a choice Munich apartment so that Unity could have it instead. (Farve and Muv visited Germany and pronounced themselves also much impressed by the Nazis.) Nancy Mitford, the eldest and most caustic of the sisters, satirized the family’s political adventures in a novel called “Wigs on the Green,” but even she had the Mitford gift for group loathing; in her case, a weirdly virulent anti-Americanism. When Decca, the clan’s only leftist, made her escape, Nancy joined forces with the family in trying to retrieve her.

After a period in Spain, the young Romillys did return, briefly, to England, where the lights and the electric heaters in their London flat “blazed away night and day,” since nobody had ever informed Decca “that you had to pay for electricity.” After the Munich pact of 1938, the couple left for America, determined to stay there while Britain’s international alignments sorted themselves out. Esmond and Decca sponged and schemed and odd-jobbed their way up and down the East Coast; he stole cigars from Katharine Graham’s father and then borrowed a thousand dollars from him to finance a share in a Miami restaurant. During the spring of 1940, in response to Hitler’s westward invasions, Romilly enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was killed the next year.

Decca remained in Washington with their baby daughter, Constancia (Dinky), finding work with the Office of Price Administration and a social life among the young New Dealers. She lived with Clifford and Virginia Durr, Southern liberals whose guests sometimes included the congressman Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife. (“Who is Lady Bird?” Muv wrote to Decca. “I looked her up in the Peerage, but could find no trace.”) By the middle of the war, Mitford had moved to San Francisco and married an O.P.A. lawyer named Robert Treuhaft. She became an American citizen in order to join the Communist Party, in whose activities she and her husband avidly participated for the next fifteen years.

Her frame of reference was decidedly unusual for an American Party member. In her memoir “A Fine Old Conflict” (1977), Mitford recalled being chosen to head the local People’s World fund-raising drive, a campaign that “was to me reminiscent of the London season.” Staff members of a California psychiatric clinic, to whom she confided her young life story in the course of a consultation about Dinky’s thumb-sucking, concluded, “Since the mother lives in a fantasy world of her own, and is incapable of giving rational and credible answers to questions, it is impossible to treat the child further.”

Mitford’s natural leftward leanings were no doubt overstimulated by the “very lonely opposition” she had maintained within her family’s feathered nest. Her ability to remain a Party member well past Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin in 1956, and beyond the Soviet invasion of Hungary later that year (necessary, she reasoned, “to preserve a socialist system . . . against what looks like a fascist coup”), suggests a garish, surrogate penitence for the Mitfords’ Nazi sinnings. Her resignation from the Party, in 1958, came about “not on any principled issue” but only because the C.P. had “got rather drab and useless.”

A reader of “Decca” (Knopf; $35), her newly collected letters, can only marvel at how such a lively spirit and instinctive debunker stayed so devoted to the Soviet commissars. Unity Mitford lasted several years in Nazi Germany before shooting herself when war broke out with England. (She survived.) It’s hard to imagine her mischievous sister making it through a month in Soviet Russia without being sent off somewhere cold for reëducation. Mitford loved making fun of the Party’s American jargon (her first extended piece of writing was a stencilled send-up called “Lifeitselfmanship”), and forever exhibited her difficulty with any form of piety or political correctness: “I should never have let you inveigle him to that Unitarian Sunday School,” she writes a friend in 1959, after her son has criticized her for generalizing about people. Several years later, she explains to her sister Debo, now the Duchess of Devonshire, that she doesn’t accept invitations “to join committees against the wicked toys they’ve got [in the U.S.],” not when she knows she “should have rather longed for a model H-bomb if they had been about when we were little.” Perhaps the worst she’s heard about LSD is that “it makes one love everyone.”

California’s Communist Party was known for being looser than other state affiliates, but Mitford’s joking still got her into trouble, and at no point in her letters or “A Fine Old Conflict” does she question the Party’s right to chastise and shun its members for the smallest deviations. In 1948, while looking forward to a relaxation of the still considerable tension between her and her mother, she seriously inquired of the local Party hierarchy whether she would be risking expulsion by allowing Muv to visit Oakland. Her ideological worst and self-mocking best are both on display in a letter written ten years later:

Sat. night to Dobby’s, a long battle to the end over Dr. Zhivago (Pasternak) with Dobby taking the position the S.U. is completely justified [in ordering the book’s suppression], the rest of us agreeing with Laurent who pointed out that the Nobel Prize people baited a nice juicy trap for the S.U. into which they fell like a ton of bricks. Needless to say, no one had read the book.

But most of her political activity was local, involving work for the East Bay Civil Rights Congress (C.R.C.) on numerous cases of police brutality perpetrated by the Oakland police department. Mitford showed plenty of bravery while travelling to the South in 1951 with several other Communist women to campaign against the conviction of Willie McGee, a black Mississippian condemned to death for raping a white woman who had probably been his consensual lover. Despite subpoenas received and passports denied, Mitford sustained an over-all feeling of comfort within America, whose “lack of bleakness” contrasted with so much of what she remembered of England. “Could it be,” she wrote her mother with some amazement in 1951, “that I am, after all, the only one who is really settled down, as they say?”

Of all the sisters, she probably made the happiest marriage; Treuhaft, himself a fine wit, is “darling old Bob” in decades’ worth of her letters, whose domestic subject matter proceeds from Pablum (“a kind of sawdust which they mix with water & feed to children here”) and housekeeping (four-year-old Dinky shows her how to clean the stove properly) to a phase in which the children are old enough to pass out leaflets and make do with sandwiches for dinner on days of heightened political activity. The Treuhafts’ worst sorrow—the death of their first son, who was run over by a bus in 1955—receives scant mention in the letters; in Mitford’s memoirs, she could not bear to write of it at all.

Treuhaft proved fully supportive of Mitford’s late start as a writer, which came toward the end of the nineteen-fifties, when the dissolution of the C.R.C. left a “vacuum” in her life. Amid early efforts at journalism (a 1957 piece for The Nation about the railroading of a sex-crime defendant by sensation-seeking journalists), she produced a first volume of memoirs, which was published in the United States as “Daughters and Rebels,” though Mitford preferred “Red Sheep.” The book required a great struggle and much assistance from friends and neighbors, who made up what Mitford, with an unusual absence of authorial ego, called “the Old Dec Writing Committee.” Even after tremendous success, she craved editing and was happy to concede points to reviewers. (In 1984, she responded to a notice I’d given to her slim memoir of her friendship with the journalist Philip Toynbee by writing, “I really loved your review—once I’d got over being a slippery character. And I expect you are absolutely right about that Alas.”)

Death became her. Led to the subject by Treuhaft, who was doing legal work for a Bay-area co-op arranging inexpensive burials, Mitford soon beheld the American funeral industry as a high-pressure game of profiteering, not to mention a paradise of macabre euphemism and fantastic technique: “If [the corpse] should be bucktoothed, his teeth are cleaned with Bon Ami and coated with colorless nail polish,” she wrote in “The American Way of Death” (1963). “His eyes, meanwhile, are closed with flesh-tinted eye caps and eye cement.”

It all left her “roaring” (a favorite word). A muckraker had been born, one whose spirits would forever be as high as her dudgeon. Disguising her nervousness—she sometimes preceded a difficult phone call with a stiff drink—she learned to dig for the dirty secret and the suspicion-raising fact. “What I should love to know,” she wrote her old friends Philip and Kay Graham at the Washington Post, “is some of the inside negotiations that go on between the flower folks and the advertising departments of newspapers.” Before “The American Way of Death,” obituary pages often gave in to pressure from florists and refused to include the phrase “Please Omit Flowers” in death notices.

Mitford’s exquisitely disgusting chapter on embalming, which helped to make “The American Way of Death” a best-seller, had nearly been cut by her editors. The book also had to survive the funeral-industry’s trumpeting of the author’s still recent Communist Party past, news that Mitford parried by pointing out that “all the best embalmers are Communists vide Lenin.” Having dodged reporters for two decades, whenever news like her remarriage or disinheritance made her good Mitford-sister copy, she now revelled in being recognized as a crusading literary celebrity.

Magazines began calling with story ideas, and she soon had “masses of things ½ cooking.” The tastiest results, including her takedown of Elizabeth Arden’s exorbitantly ineffectual Maine Chance beauty spa, were eventually collected in “Poison Penmanship” (1979), and her newly assembled letters sometimes show her writing home as a way of making notes for her articles: “I have cased the visitors book,” she tells Treuhaft from Maine Chance in November of 1965. “Part of it reads like a list of products advertised in the daily press (Heinz, Ford, Fleishmann etc).” Retaining a sense of herself as a kind of lucky amateur, Mitford was always surprised by her success in investigative journalism. She was particularly pleased when her 1970 exposé of the Famous Writers School, a mail-order fraud that had grown fat with promises to the aspirant scribbler, forced the operation out of business.

The onetime revolutionary was actually a born meliorist, shining her gleeful light upon the venal and phony, even if she never again found quite so glorious a target as the funeral industry. Her largest other subject was the U.S. prison system, which she thought exhibited several similarities to her earlier field of investigation: the wardens were often “such ducks, just like undertakers,” earnestly explaining that they’d gone into the work because they “love people”; the embalmer’s Flextone skin preparation had a kind of counterpart in the Advanced ‘Han-Ball’ Tear Gas Grenade she saw displayed at a corrections convention. But the prison book that she produced, “Kind and Usual Punishment” (1973), while full of fine stuff on matters like abusive medical experimentation (“The gradual onset of scurvy in the five prisoners is traced by Dr. Hodges with the enthusiasm of a young mother recording Baby’s first steps”), was too much of a downer for the author’s natural talents. In “The American Way of Death,” the corpse, well out of it but all made up, seems often to be as amused as the reader; not so, of course, the wretched convict.

At least a part of Mitford’s skill in exposing sharp practice came from her own taste for scams and dodges. For decades, she cheated the phone company of reversed long-distance charges—“just ring here collect for Wanda Spikdec, who will then get the number to ring back immediately”—and on occasion she travelled wearing a large arm bandage that would guarantee special treatment at the airport. She even suckered the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, whose bulk purchase of her papers and “associated materials” turned out to include, upon delivery, some cremated remains belonging to a client of Treuhaft’s.

The prologue to “Daughters and Rebels” includes the confession, odd in a memoirist, that “looking backward is not much in my nature.” Even so, the second half of Mitford’s life was often spent coming to terms with the first. She several times travelled to Lady Redesdale’s home on Inch Kenneth, a Hebridean island in which Decca had received, from her only brother, a one-sixth share. (An attempt to donate her portion to the Communist Party of Great Britain proved unsuccessful.) By 1960, her gradual reconciliation with Muv had become a source of deep pleasure, however it may have ended up distorting “Daughters and Rebels”: “It seemed fairer to portray her as she is now, improved, since improving at any time of life is such a struggle, don’t you think?” Mitford wrote to Virginia Durr.

Her sisters were a more intractable matter. Unity, who died in 1948 from the aftereffects of her suicide attempt, would come to Mitford in dreams that reflected Decca’s own enduring and horrified love: “Well there’s no forgiveness possible (nor would it have been sought by that feckless, unregenerate soul).” In the nineteen-seventies, a willingness to help Unity’s biographer, David Pryce-Jones, get to the whole truth about his subject nearly ended Mitford’s relationship with Debo.

With Diana, there had long since been nothing left to sunder. Mitford disliked not being on speaking, or writing, terms with almost anyone, but at the close of a letter to Muv she would send love to relations “with the usual exceptions.” She was prepared to go to great lengths to avoid seeing the Mosleys during a 1959 visit to Paris, where not only Nancy but Diana’s family would be present: “We envisage scenes as in corny French bedroom farces, the Mosleys popping out of one room, down an oubliette, [the Treuhafts] hiding in the stove, etc. As I pointed out to Nancy, just their chosen place for us anyway.”

Nancy Mitford—the most brilliant and personally cruel of the sisters—remained the one whose approval Decca most desired, the only one for whom she could become a “doormat” time and again. Lady Redesdale once pointed out that Nancy’s letters “usually contain a skillfully hidden dagger pointed straight at one’s heart,” but, when compared with Decca’s, the letters collected in “Love from Nancy” (1993) come across as grating little performances, falsely shrewd and oddly fluttering, self-congratulatory even when self-critical. The contentment they proclaim, over even Nancy’s long and manifestly unfulfilling affair with a married French colonel, isn’t the least bit convincing. If Decca, so badly teased and knocked off balance by her oldest sister, had been interested in the last laugh, she could have had it.

Her own letters are so full of comic set pieces, vivid narrative, and wonderfully replicated speech (including a whole page of parodic Southern palaver written out during a 1961 visit to the Durrs) that one wonders why Mitford never tried writing a novel. Fear of imitating Nancy’s success in the genre may have been a factor; Decca even worried that the British title of her first memoir, “Hons and Rebels,” might cause the older sister, famous for popularizing “U” and “non-U” speech distinctions, to “think it’s cashing in on her stuff.” One suspects, however, a more fundamental reason; namely, that the novel would have seemed too precious and artificial a form to such a lover of real-life rumpus and corrective action.

Letter-writing, by contrast, always retained its element of practical urgency, even as it allowed Mitford to roar and entertain and make verbal equivalents of the faces she liked to make at the lectern in front of flesh-and-blood crowds. If she sometimes overindulged tendencies toward the crude and the cute, these resulted only in small patches upon her contributions to a genre that was never designed for aesthetic perfection. “Decca” is a smashing accumulation, a buoyant offering atop the last wave of a literary form that now, having disappeared into the electronic ether, lies as dead as one of Mitford’s Flextoned corpses. During the fax’s brief moment, between the post and e-mail, Mitford corresponded with Miss Manners over the etiquette governing the new machine, and managed to adapt at least one old epistolary convention to the world’s new instantaneousness: “Yrs of 9:54 from Chatsworth just rec’d,” she informed Debo.

Mitford preferred gadgets to greenery (“Nature, nature, how I hate yer”) and believed that keeping fit was only likely to prolong the miseries of whatever cancerous affliction got one in the end. Nursing homes would have been a marvellous subject for her, better than her late exploration of obstetrics; she described herself as going “from the Grave to the Cradle” with “The American Way of Birth,” in 1992. She did, after a bad fall, give up drinking, but backslid from efforts to quit smoking, which included her husband’s attempt at aversion therapy: “Bob collected a ton of disgusting butts & ashes, & all I did was to breathe in deeply & say ‘HOW divine.’ ” Their marriage survived an affair of Treuhaft’s in the mid-nineteen-eighties, and they soon returned to “all the old feelings of pleasantness & fun” between the two of them.

As friends died off, Mitford realized that she missed the arrival of their letters more than the people themselves: “Oh for the writing on the env!” In the middle of the night, two weeks before she died, of lung cancer, she wrote a splendidly matter-of-fact farewell to Treuhaft, asleep in another room: “Bob—it’s so ODD to be dying, so I must just jot a few thoughts.” Those mostly concerned the good fortune they’d had together, but Mitford moved on to giving her husband some advice: “You’ll need someone—I mean you’ve got all those household skills, cooking etc., pity to waste don’t you agree? Be thinking of someone agreeable. You won’t have to as they’ll come flocking I bet. I do have some ideas but fear to mention for fear of annoying or being intrusive, none of my business you’ll say.” She concluded with an expression of avidity for the next simple thing: “By the way—do go to that film this evening [and] dinner . . . . I long to hear all about it. . . . Should be v. innaresting.” She died on July 23, 1996; her cremation cost four hundred and seventy-five dollars.

Mitford assessed herself, accurately, as being “not a specially introspective type.” She “never felt ‘let down’ ” by anyone, and, as much as she took to America, she found the “pursuit of happiness” to be “an absurd idea.” Nonetheless, she found it, in the knockabout company of enemies and friends alike. To those who had assured her that a week at Maine Chance spa would leave her feeling wonderful, she later reported, “As I always feel perfectly OK anyhow, I haven’t noted the difference.” A week spent with her letters makes everybody else seem a bore. One wonders how she stood it, and with such a fine old gusto. ♦